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Thursday, 30 May 2013

If you, like me, are worried about the Islamization of the West because it will erode our civil liberties, like freedom of speech and freedom of conscience, you should carefully consider that there are other trends in our society that have nothing to do with Islam but are taking us in the same anti-libertarian direction, both giving too much power to the government and at the same time paving the way to quasi-totalitarian societies, thus indirectly enabling Islamic supremacism to flourish and do its damage.

I am examining here the case of Britain, but the pattern is similar in many other Western countries. The UK government is trying to make us believe that its proposed introduction of a gay marriage law is a progressive move with the declared purpose of giving gays equal rights of which they are deprived at the moment. But this is not true: in fact homosexuals of both sexes already have equal rights, due to the legalization of civil partnerships.

This is so much true that many gays don't want same-sex marriage. This is from the website Gays against Gay Marriage, and is written by a gay:

I don’t understand the reasoning behind the suggestion that civil unions or some other marriage equivalent, with all the benefits of traditional legal marriage, are somehow not good enough. Olbermann seems to be saying that it is only the exact legal label applied to heterosexual unions — actual “marriage” — that will do. But why? What is the reason that it’s not good enough? Allow me to put my Freud hat on.

For gay supporters of marriage, this may be an attempt to force society to recognize and, well, love their love. It’s a way to make up for the rejection many of them felt by their hick Christian families, or their meathead peers in school as a child. The fact is, they will hate you even more if you are allowed to get married. Now, I don’t deny that it is hilarious and delightful to make bible beaters uncomfortable — the idea of a religious government official forced to legally refer to two men as “husbands” puts a smile on my vindictive face — but inflicting pain on one’s enemies alone is not reason to call for gay marriage.

Ben Summerskill, the Chief Executive of the UK lesbian, gay and bisexual equality organisation Stonewall, the largest gay equality body in Europe, famously said in an interview with Pink News: "Lots of gay and lesbian people don’t actually want marriage". Stonewall refused to endorse same-sex marriage until it was intimidated and pressured to do so by other gay groups: "Mr Summerskill also accused PinkNews.co.uk of running an 'unethical campaign' against Stonewall after it asked every LGBT rights organisation/ political group to outline their stance on marriage equality. Only Stonewall refused to answer."

Now, a submission by the Church of England into the Government’s consultation on gay marriage has warned of an historic division between the Church’s canon law — that marriage is between a man and a woman — and Parliament.

It suggests the schism could even lead to ‘disestablishment’, a split between the Church and the State, and the removal of the Queen as Supreme Governor of the Church.

Despite the opposition of every major faith group — notably the Catholic Church — Mr Cameron is arrogantly pressing ahead with an issue which excites his chums in the metropolitan elite, but which disregards the sentiments of millions of ordinary people who, as poll after poll has shown, are against it.

Even some of the Prime Minister’s admirers concede that the policy has less to do with offering equality to the gay community and more to do with decontaminating the allegedly ‘toxic’ Tory brand.

Perhaps the Prime Minister has calculated that anyone who stands up and argues against his proposals will be branded a homophobe and a bigot.

Well, Mr Cameron, I am a Conservative and a homosexual, and I oppose gay marriage. Am I a bigot?

And what about Alan Duncan, the first Conservative MP to come out as gay? Mr Duncan, the International Aid Minister who is in a civil partnership, is implacably opposed to gay marriage.

So is Dr David Starkey, the celebrated historian, who is openly gay...

Yet I understand the Government’s Equalities office, having approached a polling company to test the opinion of the gay community, then decided not to go ahead.

Were the officials worried what the conclusions might be? None of my gay friends want gay marriage to be written into law...

The truth is that no one has been able to explain to me the difference between gay marriage and a civil partnership. I have asked ministers and friends. None has an answer.

But I do. We already have gay marriage — it’s called civil partnership. Why can’t Mr Cameron just leave it there?

I am the surviving civil partner of a long-term gay relationship. The state has recognised this relationship fully in all my dealings since my civil partner’s death from cancer in 2007. I do not support 'gay marriage’ because the term adds nothing of substance to what I already have received and needlessly offends some members of certain religious faiths (which, incidentally I do not hold).

One of the first openly homosexual MPs and the first to enter into a civil partnership, former Culture Secretary and Labour MP Ben Bradshaw,

said homosexuals had already won equal rights with the introduction of civil partnerships and had "never needed the word 'marriage' ".

The Labour MP claimed the Prime Minister's motivation was simply to try to show that the Conservatives had modernised their views of society...

"This isn't a priority for the gay community, which already won equal rights. We've never needed the word 'marriage'."

So, if the gay community already won equal rights, why is Prime Minister David Cameron pushing for same-sex marriage?

Cameron is the true representative of a political class that tries to enlarge the size of government and increase what it can control.

Personal relationships don't need to be regulated by the state. The only exception is marriage, for the reason that it is a unique relationship: it has the capability of producing new life, and the role of society is to protect the vulnerable, of whom children are a prime example.

If their parents don't look after children, society will have to. Hence the legalization of marriage between a man and a woman, an institution which pre-dates law and church in human history. There is a rational reason for this legalization, namely to ensure that the natural parents take responsibility for their children in front of society and the law.

No other relationship can produce children, which is why no other relationship needs to be regulated in the same way.

But regulating what does not need to be regulated and legislating on matters that don't require the intervention of the law is what governments do when they want to extend their sphere of influence and grow their power.

We also have to understand the repercussions of this new, proposed legislation on censorship and the freedom of speech, which will be endangered in a way which has echoes of the blasphemy laws demanded by Muslims.

The methods used by Islamic supremacists, like death threats, are also similarly used. MP David Burrowes, during his speech in the Commons debate on the bill, described how he had been called a Nazi and a bigot and subjected to death threats because of his views. "His children had been told that their father is a bigot and a homophobe."

Once the bill on same-sex marriage legalization becomes law, automatically everyone who publicly disagrees with the view behind that law will be doing something at best subversive and at worst illegal.

People can even be threatened with legal action, arrested, prosecuted or otherwise silenced for expressing a different opinion: this is what has been happening in countries where same-sex marriage has been legalized, like Canada for instance.

Since the introduction of same-sex marriage there in 2005, relatively few gay couples got married, but what happened to freedom of speech and conscience is terrifying. Canadian author and broadcaster Michael Coren writes:

In the few debates leading up to the decision, it became almost impossible to argue in defense of marriage as a child-centered institution, in defense of the procreative norm of marriage, in defense of the superiority of two-gender parenthood, without being thrown into the waste bin as a hater. What we’ve also discovered in Canada is that it can get even worse than mere abuse, and that once gay marriage becomes law, critics are often silenced by the force of the law.

...it’s estimated that, in less than five years, there have been between 200 and 300 proceedings — in courts, human-rights commissions, and employment boards — against critics and opponents of same-sex marriage. And this estimate doesn’t take into account the casual dismissals that surely have occurred.

In 2011, for example, a well-known television anchor on a major sports show was fired just hours after he tweeted his support for ‘the traditional and TRUE meaning of marriage’. He had merely been defending a hockey player’s agent who was receiving numerous death threats and other abuse for refusing to support a pro-gay-marriage campaign. The case is still under appeal, in human-rights commissions and, potentially, the courts.

The Roman Catholic bishop of Calgary, Alberta, Fred Henry, was threatened with litigation and charged with a human-rights violation after he wrote a letter to local churches outlining standard Catholic teaching on marriage. He is hardly a reactionary — he used to be known as ‘Red Fred’ because of his support for the labour movement — but the archdiocese eventually had to settle with the complainants to avoid an embarrassing and expensive trial…

What has become painfully evident is that many of those who brought same-sex marriage to Canada have no respect for freedom of conscience and no intention of tolerating contrary opinion, whether that opinion is shaped by religious or by secular belief.

There have been a lot of cases in Canada and elsewhere that we can consider big infringements of freedom of speech, concerning people who disagreed with the law.

Legalizing same-sex marriage means that the law is saying that same-sex marriage is right, fair and in fact it's a recognition of equality between homosexuals and heterosexuals, in fact this is the way in which both the bill and the whole debate in the UK are framed.

So, everyone who disagrees with something like this which is put in terms of equality of rights will de facto, automatically become a bigot. This has far-reaching consequences for the freedom of speech. If we are serious about freedom of speech, we should understand all these implications of the bill on same-sex marriage.

In numerous ways not homosexuals themselves, who in many cases are opposed to same-sex marriage, but some homosexual activists are acting like Muslims, in that they are trying to impose their views on everybody else and classifying everyone who disagrees with them as bigot, homophobic in one case and Islamophobic in the other.

Even the ad hoc pejoratives newly created for the purpose of ad hominem attacks are similar, with the insistence on the -phobic suffix. When I say "Muslims" I intend the term in a general sense, not a universal sense, i.e. not every Muslim will comply with what the Quran commands, not every single Muslim will be and do what the Quran preaches, prescribes and requires, but the latter, although not being what every Muslim is and does, is what every Muslim should be and do, hence the generalization, but not universalization, in my use of the term "Muslim" here.

The passing of the law on same-sex marriage would have these serious consequences, among others: teachers in state schools will be forced to teach pupils about it and endorse it, or they may be lawfully disciplined or dismissed; parents will not be free to withdraw their children from such lessons, and legal action could be taken against those who do; children will be taught to disregard their parents' opinion as "bigoted", creating a division between kids and parents; NHS/University/Armed Forces/Police chaplains could be legally fired for expressing disagreement even outside work time; so could public sector workers; foster carers could be lawfully rejected by local authorities if they disagree; registrars will be forced to act against their conscience, and conscientious objectors will be fired; churches, synagogues and other places of worship could be forced to perform same-sex marriages if the European Courts overturn the UK government's position on this issue; the Church of England may have to disestablish or face legal action because, as the established Church, it will be obliged to marry same-sex couples; clergy who disagree with same-sex marriage, but belong to denominations that don't, could be taken to court if they follow their conscience; dissenting faith-based charities will be penalized in a number of ways, from a ban from hiring public facilities to being closed down, as has been the case of adoption agencies.

All this because the UK government has chosen to interfere with people's personal relationships, which it has no business of doing, and to decide what the definition of marriage should be, which society, and not government, should decide.

And not because this is an issue that many people care about, not even many gays. The majority of public opinion is actually against same-sex marriage. Opinion polls indicate that, when the rights offered to homosexual couples through civil partnerships are clearly explained, most people in the UK oppose same-sex marriage.

Many polls have been commissioned by both sides of the debate, but using small samples and therefore unreliable. The largest and most statistically significant poll so far is the British Social Attitudes Survey (BSA) 2008, which asked:

“About how same sex couples should be treated in law. Which comes closest to your view … they should be allowed legally to marry OR should be allowed legally to form civil unions, but not marry OR should not be allowed to obtain legal recognition for their relationships?”

The result was: 33.7 % replied that they should be allowed to marry, and 62.6 % answered that they should not (putting together the second two responses).

I'll end with a quotation from the article by Andrew Pierce linked to above:

Mr Cameron seems to have learned nothing from the follies of the Labour government when it comes to imposing an equalities agenda on Britain’s leading faiths.

In 2007, Labour passed legislation which effectively ordered Roman Catholic adoption agencies to place children with same-sex couples.

Now I have to declare an interest in this aspect of the argument: I spent the first two years of my life in a Catholic orphanage in Cheltenham run by nuns and, to this day, I am eternally grateful to the Catholic Children’s Society which placed me in a loving home with my adoptive parents, who cared for me as one of their own. But, disgracefully, societies like the ones that rescued me and thousands of other abandoned children have now been forced to close down because the Catholic Church understandably could not accept the Labour government’s diktat — which ran contrary to its sincerely-held beliefs.

As a lapsed Catholic, I am not going to defend that Church’s teaching that homosexuality is a sin, but to force its adoption agencies to close on a point of moral principle was a scandal which has resulted in countless vulnerable children being denied the possibility of loving homes. What madness!

And for pity’s sake, which gays would have gone to Catholic agencies in the first place?

Those terribly depressing consequences of Labour’s sweeping changes should serve as a warning as the Tory-led Government presses on with the rewriting of the centuries-old tradition of marriage.

Saturday, 25 May 2013

Now, finally, the British authorities are determined to do something serious and decisive in relation to the Woolwich beheading.

They have warned, charged, arrested and released on bail several people for making inflammatory and anti-Muslim comments on Twitter and Facebook. Police say people should be careful about what they write on Twitter as the 'consequences could be serious'.

Now you're talking! Our authorities are not cowered into submission by a bunch of extremist, radical, dangerous and murderous Islamists, sorry, Islamophobes!

Two of the men arrested were trying to organise an anti-Muslim protest in Bristol and made racist and “anti-religious” remarks.

I like that "anti-religious". Would they have been arrested for insulting Christianity?

The two Bristol men were held under the Public Order Act on suspicion of inciting racial or religious hatred.

Friday, 24 May 2013

The English vocabulary will soon be depleted of words, if everybody starts speaking like the mainstream media. In connection with the Woolwich killing, the media talked about "religious centres", not "mosques", a now obsolete word. Other archaic, disused terms are "Islam" and "Muslim": we just say "man", "woman" and as useful data we add their age.

A news flash on BBC Radio 5 Live delivered the information that, basically, a man had been killed in Woolwich by two men, and there were another man and a woman, both 29, involved. Of course it is that magic age, 29, that makes all the difference. There are plenty of men and women aged 29 who go around slaughtering and slaying, but thankfully none aged 28 or 30. How could anyone listening to that news flash be enlightened on the nature of the act by this kind of very general, non-specific "information"?

A TV news reporter, in a desperate attempt to exculpate Islam, said that there have been more Muslims than non-Muslims killed by Muslim attacks.

What does that mean? The first victims of Islam are Muslims themselves, that seems pretty obvious to me. The simplest way to realize that is to look at the Muslim-majority countries of the world and see in what terrible state they are. But this does not exonerate the doctrine of Islam and its violent nature.

The media commentaries seem to attach a lot of importance to finding out whether this was a "lone wolf" attack or had an organization behind it, the assumption probably being that lone wolves should provoke less concern, causing only a one-off incident.

If that is the assumption, it's far from correct. If we have not had another 7/7 in London and generally the UK, it is because a vast amount of money and resources from our cash-strapped government has had to be allocated to the police and intelligence services' task of keeping an eye on the "Muslim community".

When an attack is planned, it is easier for the security services to discover the plan and foil it. Yesterday's murder, on the surface, looks like it might have been one without much planning or organization: these killings will be practically impossible to be prevented, as the police said.

Therefore, some other Muslim "lone wolf" who has observed the success of this murder and the impossibility of thwarting it may be encouraged to repeat the enterprise. It is likely that we will see many more of these attacks, since the plots by organized groups are more vulnerable to preventative actions by security services.

This is also the prediction of radical Muslim Anjem Choudary, who led the ominous-sounding group Islam4UK, in its own words "working for the establishment of the Shariah - to make it dominate all other ways of life." The group is now banned, but not on YouTube.

Choudary prophesied: "We are a very politicised community. Some people are angered by draconian measures such as 'stop and search' and restrictions on free speech. There is a chance of more lone wolf attacks happening again due to these draconian measures".

A TV commentator said that the killer we saw on a video speaking to the camera is British and has an obvious London accent, but still feels closer to places, like Afghanistan and Iraq, that he's probably never even visited.

But shouldn't that ring an alarm bell? Oughtn't that to be an indication that place of birth and accent are irrelevant in this context? Of course he feels loyal to his "brothers" in Muslim countries. The nation-state is a European invention that followed the Peace of Westphalia in 1648. For Islam the nation is the Ummah, all the world's Muslims. This man does not feel British, he feels Muslim - and many other Muslims living in the UK will feel the same allegiance to the "Nation of Islam", as in the name of a black racist and Islamic supremacist organization in the USA.

The pathetic utterances about searches for "motives" behind the murder are also ridiculous. There is nothing to search: the jihadist on the video shown by TV stations the world over makes it very clear.

In the fuller version of the video published by Jihad Watch, at the beginning he mentions Surat at-Tawba, the ninth sura (chapter) of the Qur'an, which contains exhortations to kill infidels. He says:

The only reason we have killed this man today is because Muslims are dying daily by British soldiers. And this British soldier is one. It is an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. By Allah, we swear by the almighty Allah we will never stop fighting you until you leave us alone. So what if we want to live by the Shari'a in Muslim lands? Why does that mean you must follow us and chase us and call us extremists and kill us? Rather you lot are extreme. You are the ones that when you drop a bomb you think it hits one person? Or rather your bomb wipes out a whole family? This is the reality. By Allah if I saw your mother today with a buggy I would help her up the stairs. This is my nature. But we are forced by the Qur'an, in Sura At-Tawba, through many ayah in the Qu'ran, we must fight them as they fight us.

He also said that he wanted to "start a war in London tonight".

Could this be any clearer?

The only problem is that this is precisely the part that the mainstream media have cut out: it's not so much a search for motives that is needed, as refraining from covering them up.

It would appear that the jihadists were tired of media lies and wanted the public to know why they committed this atrocious beheading, in this day and age a quintessentially Islamic way of killing. The media won again, by depriving them (and more importantly us) of the benefit of telling (and hearing) the truth.

What a strange coincidence, having omitted just that highly explanatory bit!

The parents of at least one of the two perpetrators came from Nigeria, another interesting country where Muslims slaughter Christians like there's no tomorrow. Nigeria is in fact one of the worst countries in the world in this respect, called by International Christian Concern The deadliest place to be a Christian.

Nearly 1,000 Nigerian Christians were killed in 2012, and more than 100 have died in the first few months of 2013, according to Jubilee Campaign. Executive director Ann Buwalda says this accounts for “almost 70 percent of Christians killed globally” last year, making Nigeria “the most lethal country for Christians by a huge margin.”

But, in the West, who cares? And, further, who is informed by the media? After we've been ignoring what Nigerian Muslims do to people in their country, now they are carrying out the same job here. Will we still ignore it?

What next? Clergy advised not to wear cassocks and dog collars? Oh that's already happened, after a number of Muslim attacks on priests in East London some years ago.

We have made so many concessions to Islam that one more or less doesn't make much difference. What's a uniform between friends?

This kind of advice is akin to trying to cure pneumonia with paracetamol. The real treatment would be a bit more radical (from "radix", the Latin word for "root"), going to the root of the problem, addressing the disease rather than the symptom: if there were no Muslims in Britain, there would hardly be any terror attacks.

Paul Weston, the Chairman of Liberty GB, the UK's newly-formed counterjihad, truly conservative party, has this interesting article on the party's site commenting on the reactions by PM David Cameron, London Mayor Boris Johnson and assorted mainstream media voices to the Woolwich murder.

I agree with everything he says, except his mention of one perpetrator's Nigerian nationality as a lack of motive for opposing in such a violent manner the UK's military presence in a country which is not his, Afghanistan. For Muslims, European-invented nation-states don't mean as much as the Ummah, the "Nation of Islam", all Muslims of the world.

But he is good. Come and see him, Dr George Whale and Matthew Roberts, speaking at the first-ever public meeting of Liberty GB Saturday 25 May 6.30pm in Croydon (details here).

With the first jihadi murder of a British soldier on British soil, the nation awoke on Thursday morning to a new multicultural reality. Prime Minister David Cameron, notably absent from the political scene whilst thousands of young white girls were being raped and tortured by Muslim paedophiles, suddenly discovered his inner Churchill and stated the following:

"What happened yesterday in Woolwich has sickened us all. On our televisions last night and in our newspapers this morning we have all seen images that are deeply shocking. The people who did this were trying to divide us. They should know something like this will only bring us together and make us stronger ... this country will be absolutely resolute in its stand against violent extremism and terror. We will never give in to terror or terrorism.”

Mr Cameron seemed to sound very brave and statesmanlike, but by deliberately leaving out words such as Muslim, Islam or jihad, he rather negated his point about never giving in to terror or terrorism. He then went even further and made the following astonishing quote:

"This view is shared by every community in our country. This was not just an attack on Britain and the British way of life, it was a betrayal of Islam and the Muslim communities. There is nothing in Islam that justifies this truly dreadful act. Britain works with our international partners to make the world safe from terrorism. Terrorism that has taken more Muslim lives than any other religion. It is an utter perversion of the truth to pretend anything different."

London Mayor Boris Johnson also made his appeasing appearance when he claimed "it is completely wrong to blame this killing on Islam but also wrong to draw a link between this murder and British foreign policy." Sorry Boris, you are wrong on both counts. Islam is entirely to blame when it kills in the name of Islam, and if you are going to get involved in the invasion of Islamic countries it would be unduly optimistic if this did not upset home-grown British Muslims who make their loyalty to religion before country very plain indeed ...

But Cameron and Johnson know only too well they are reciting dhimmi appeasement. Robert Spencer at Jihadwatch duly lays out the verses from the Koran acted out by the Muslim murderers yesterday, including this quote from one of the murderers, which strangely was omitted by the mainstream media: "But we are forced by the Qur'an, in Sura At-Tawba, through many ayah in the Qu'ran, we must fight them as they fight us.”

The BBC weighed in with its usual 'apologist for Islam' propaganda. Their home affairs editor, one Dominic Casciani had this to say:

"The mindset of violent jihadists is influenced by many different factors – but one common factor among those who have been involved in acts of politically-motivated violence is the basic principle that they oppose a Western presence in the Islamic world.

"Sometimes when purely political Islamists refer to this presence, they mean cultural pollution – the arrival of influences that they don't particularly want to see. Think scantily-clad pop stars beamed around the world on satellite TV.

"But for jihadists, it really comes down to the presence of soldiers – and an entire framework of belief that sees those personnel, whatever role they have been given under international law, as the enemy of Islam. That argument is often backed up with graphic images online of the suffering of ordinary women and children."

Unfortunately for the BBC appeasement brigade, one of the two Muslim murderers was a Nigerian, and if memory serves me correctly I don't believe British forces are oppressing Nigerians in Nigeria at this moment in time. In point of fact, I believe Nigerian Muslims are extremely busy slaughtering Nigerian Christians, but we must not let such Islamic reality cloud the world-view of the left-liberal children within al-Beeb.

Some 'right-wing' newspapers, such as The Telegraph, allied themselves with Dave's appeasement policy. Their writer Jake Wallis Simons penned an odious column titled "Far-Right EDL Exploit Woolwich Terrorist Attack" which made no mention of the evil of Islam, preferring instead to dwell on the EDL presence in Woolwich, whose members "exist in a state of perpetual febrility, gunpowder waiting for a spark ... led by Tommy Robinson ... fighting the police in Woolwich".

Brave Jake switched off the comments section of course, because he knew his view was out of kilter with mainstream opinion. Another equally cowardly journalist, this time at The Spectator, also turned off the comments section linked to his article "Not In Our Name" which quoted any number of prominent Muslims tweeting their view that Islam had nothing to do with the murder.

One newspaper which did allow comments was the Daily Mail, which carried a story about the EDL presence in Woolwich, along with details of various anti-Islamic slogans sprayed on mosque doors and walls. The comments were interesting. The least popular, with minus 2,616 votes said: "EDL are scum! Violence only generates more violence." The top rated comment however, with 9,046 positive votes said: "Funny how the police managed to clamp down on the EDL immediately yet they took 30 minutes to get to the scene of the murder.”

The appeasing elites appear to be well out of line with popular opinion on this jihadist murder. But pretending it has nothing to do with Islam, whilst suggesting the EDL is just a bunch of opportunistic racist thugs, is clearly no longer being accepted as the truth by the British people. In other words, the left-liberal elites are in terrible trouble and know it.

In 2007 I wrote a two-part article called "Is European Civil War Inevitable by 2025" (see here and here in which I made the following point:

Somewhere between 2017 and 2030, during a period of heightened tension, Islamists in France, Holland or Britain will blow up one church, train or plane too many. Retaliation will begin and they, in turn will respond. So will the spiral begin. When the violence reaches a tipping point every person – be they moderate or extremist in their views – will be forced to take sides in this war. There will be no bystanders, and no civilians. Moderate Muslims will in all likelihood take the sides of the extremists. This war will resemble none of Europe's previous conflicts, with their standing armies massed along clearly delineated lines. In the coming conflagration, it will initially be civilians, armed not with tanks and machine guns, but with knives, bombs and terror, who will call out the dogs of war.

We are slowly getting closer to this inevitable point, no matter how much our quisling rulers strive to deny or wish away the logical consequences of their perverted, leftist, multicultural ideology.

Thursday, 23 May 2013

A very interesting article by Michael Copeland on the UK counterjihad party Liberty GB's website, on how allowing thousands and thousands of people from distant and alien cultures into Britain, many of whom are breaking the law even at the time of entry into the country, is leading us - or already has - to a situation where law is difficult to enforce due to the break of consensus on norms of behaviour.

This obviously follows yesterday's jihadist beheading of a British soldier in broad daylight on a high street of London.

It's got a clever title too, "The West Made Wild" (all emphases added):

Law and order, as we mostly assume, are achieved by legislation and law enforcement. It is not quite as simple as that, though. Observance of the law is not accomplished solely by those agencies: it is the product of consensus. We citizens are aware of the accepted norms and observe them by consensus for the sake of peaceful mutual coexistence. Most of our behaviour is governed by this understanding, by custom and practice, not by detailed knowledge of the law. It is this consensus, though, that has been destroyed – yes, not 'lost', but destroyed.

Governments in the West in recent years have encouraged and permitted the arrival of thousands and thousands and thousands of people from hugely different foreign cultures, including some cultures where carrying a weapon is normal. Some arrivals are of unknown criminal background, and most will, of course, be completely unfamiliar with our laws and customs. Quite a number speak no English. In addition considerable though unascertainable numbers of entrants have arrived unlawfully and are living 'under the radar'. By definition these are not law-abiding, nor are they citizens. As a result the consensus for observance of the law is eliminated. In effect governments in Europe have made the West into a sort of recreated Wild West. The level of law enforcement appropriate for the old consensus is not adequate for the new free-for-all.

We are less safe. Quality of life has been adversely affected. We know that. Perforce our response has been to adjust our behaviour to our own disadvantage, by reducing our expectations to a new lower standard. We do this and subconsciously adjust: the loss becomes normalised. Pensioners refrain from going out at night. Women are not safe on their own. Indigenous British refrain from setting foot in problem areas where they know they are likely to be assaulted. It is a loss of life quality.

When Enoch Powell made the speeches for which the Left have ever since continually vilified him the level of immigration giving him concern was 30,000. Later it grew. By 1978, when Mrs. Thatcher voiced her concern, it was half as much again and more. She said: "We must hold out the clear prospect of an end to immigration because at the moment it is about between 45,000 and 50,000 people coming in a year."

The clear prospect never came. The end never came. Instead, after Labour came to power in 1997 they sent immigration into overdrive. Powered behind the scenes by the EU, and quite possibly helped by petrodollars, this was Labour's social engineering for voter population replacement: the aim was to outnumber the Right and "rub their noses in diversity". The immigration figure for 2011 was 593,000. This is unsustainable. It is a surreal Mickey Mouse and the broomsticks.

This state of affairs has been inflicted on us, largely by the EU. We did not request it. We were never consulted. Our objections have not been heeded. The hideous irony is that we are paying for it, and paying dearly in numerous ways. We pay the government to govern and this is what we get. We pay into the EU but have no control over the unelected decision-drivers. We pay for these arrivals' welfare, housing, health, schooling, interpreters and social facilitators. We pay for bogus 'single mothers' who are, in fact, polygamous wives. We pay in the loss of whole neighbourhoods, whole towns even. We pay in crime. We pay police, expensive lawyers, judges, prisons, the whole apparatus. We are less safe, and, worse, we are bankrupt.We need a halt to immigration. We need a referendum. There is more trouble ahead.

Liberty GB says that its authorship is disputed and it has been around the internet for some time. Its website republishes it at this moment when what the article says rings a particularly true, tragic bell.

If we do not wake up in time, it may become too late:

I used to know a man whose family were German aristocracy prior to World War II. They owned a number of large industries and estates. I asked him how many German people were true Nazis, and the answer he gave has stuck with me and guided my attitude toward fanaticism ever since.

"Very few people were true Nazis," he said, "but many enjoyed the return of German pride, and many more were too busy to care. I was one of those who just thought the Nazis were a bunch of fools. So, the majority just sat back and let it all happen. Then, before we knew it, they owned us, and we had lost control, and the end of the world had come. My family lost everything. I ended up in a concentration camp and the Allies destroyed my factories."

We are told again and again by experts and talking heads that Islam is the religion of peace, and that the vast majority of Muslims just want to live in peace. Although this unquantified assertion may be true, it is entirely irrelevant. It is meaningless fluff, meant to make us feel better, and meant to somehow diminish the spectre of fanatics rampaging across the globe in the name of Islam.

The fact is that the fanatics rule Islam at this moment in history. It is the fanatics who march. It is the fanatics who wage any one of 50 shooting wars worldwide. It is the fanatics who systematically slaughter Christian or tribal groups throughout Africa and are gradually taking over the entire continent in an Islamic wave. It is the fanatics who bomb, behead, murder and execute honour killings. It is the fanatics who take over mosque after mosque. It is the fanatics who zealously spread the stoning and hanging of rape victims and homosexuals. The hard, quantifiable fact is that the 'peaceful majority' is the silent majority, and it is cowed and extraneous.Communist Russia was comprised of Russians who just wanted to live in peace, yet the Russian Communists were responsible for the murder of about 20 million people. The peaceful majority were irrelevant. China's huge population was peaceful as well, but Chinese Communists managed to kill a staggering 70 million people. The average Japanese individual prior to World War II was not a war-mongering sadist. Yet, Japan murdered and slaughtered its way across Southeast Asia in an orgy of killing that included the systematic murder of 12 million Chinese civilians – most killed by sword, shovel and bayonet. And who can forget Rwanda, which collapsed into butchery? Could it not be said that the majority of Rwandans were 'peace loving'?

History lessons are often incredibly simple and blunt; yet, for all our powers of reason, we often miss the most basic and uncomplicated of points. Peace-loving Muslims have been made irrelevant by the fanatics. Peace-loving Muslims have been made irrelevant by their silence. Peace-loving Muslims will become our enemy if they don't speak up, because, like my friend from Germany, they will awaken one day and find that the fanatics own them, and the end of their world will have begun.

Peace-loving Germans, Japanese, Chinese, Russians, Rwandans, Bosnians, Afghanis, Iraqis, Palestinians, Somalis, Nigerians, Algerians and many others, have died because the peaceful majority did not speak up until it was too late. As for us, watching it all unfold, we must pay attention to the only group that counts: the fanatics who threaten our way of life.

After the beheading, one of the jihadists, with blood in his hands, holding a knife and a machete, talking to the camera, says: "An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth", and swears by Allah: "We will never stop fighting you".

In the fuller version of the video at Jihad Watch, at the beginning he mentions Surat at-Tawba, the ninth sura (chapter) of the Qur'an, which contains exhortations to kill infidels.

I've summarized here the events as they developed and became known, from the BBC feed:

A witness claims two men in a car ran over another man walking along the street, then got out of the car and carried out an axe attack on him, killing him, the BBC's Matt Prodger reports.

It is claimed the victim was wearing a Help for Heroes charity T-shirt. He was a soldier, a young army cadet serving in the Woolwich Barracks, South-East London.

The police responded and then shot the two attackers in front of the public.

The two injured men were taken away from the scene, and London Ambulance Service says one is in a "serious" condition.

Police have removed a "substantial number of weapons" from the scene, including knives and at least one firearm.

One witness, identified only as James, said two men attacked another man, aged about 20, who was wearing a Help for Heroes T-shirt.

"These two guys were crazed. They were just animals. They dragged him from the pavement and dumped his body in the middle of the road and left his body there," he told LBC radio.

Another eyewitness wishing to remain anonymous said:

"I was walking my dog and heard some shouting about 50 yards from me. A man was running down the road and being chased by a car. The car then screeched to a halt and two men got out one had some kind of sword. They literally swung at the other guy's head. The armed police turned up and there were some shots. We were told to go home and now they won't let us out. We're in lockdown. There actually now seems more activity than there was before. I can hear helicopters and there are police officers with guns."

Witness Graham Wilders told the BBC he arrived on the scene to find a car crashed into a wall and a man on the ground.

"Two people were lying over him and I thought they were trying to resuscitate him," he said.

But Mr Wilders said he drove on to park his car, and when he returned another witness told him the two men were stabbing the man on the ground.

Senior Whitehall sources have told the BBC that the Woolwich attackers are thought to have tried to film their attack whilst shouting "Allahu Akbar" - God is Great, says political editor Nick Robinson.

The men were said to have been of Muslim appearance (surprise, surprise!).

The government is now treating this as a suspected terrorist attack, Mr Robinson says.

The article, alliteratively entitled Assassination Plot Points to Perilous Position of Patriarch, explores the history of the Christians of what is Turkey today under Muslim Ottoman rule and their dhimmi (subjugated) status, adding: "One aspect of the dhimma which is most terrifying is the concept of “collective punishment.” If one Christian violates the dhimma contract, Muslims may attack any or all Christians. The real world applications of this practice during the Ottoman era were severe indeed" (Emphasis mine).

This situation worsened over the ages since the Fall of Constantinople to the Muslim armies in 1453 through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The birth of nationalist and liberal (not in the current, politically-correct sense, mind you, but in the opposite, freedom-loving, classical-liberalism sense) movements throughout Europe in the 19th century resulted in the 1821 uprising against the Ottoman Empire by Greeks in Turkey and Constantinople, who suffered terrible slaughter.

Sidway, quoting from historical sources, focuses on the position of the Orthodox Church during the Ottoman rule, "a terrible one, and it is impossible to describe all the suffering, humiliation, and outright persecution the Church was obliged to undergo in this age, which was dark indeed... many [patriarchs] were put to torture… Churches were defiled, relics cut to pieces, and the Holy Gifts profaned. Christian pogroms became more and more frequent".

Ecumenical Patriarchs, other clergy and even monastics were killed under the Muslim Turks, suffering martyric deaths, and "paved the way towards freedom for the Greek people". Links are in the original article:

Recently a man was arrested in Turkey in connection with a plot to assassinate Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew I of Constantinople. The alleged plot was set up to slay the Patriarch on the 560th anniversary of the Fall of Constantinople on May 29. You can read a couple of articles covering different aspects of the story at Huffington Post and at Today’s Zaman (a Turkish news website).

What I would like to draw attention to, so as to provide some context for this story, is the very real threat to Ecumenical Patriarchate (and indeed to all Christian clergy) over the past several hundred years...

But the amazing contribution of the “higher clergy,” the bishops, is very important. Again we turn to John Sanidopoulos, who translates an historical summary by political scientist Konstandinos Holevas:

Blood-Stained Cassocks and 1821

Without the Orthodox clergy the great national campaign of 1821 would not have succeeded. Some propagandists of outdated ideologies deny the role of the Bishops and speak only of the “lower clergy”. They are wrong both in terms of terminology and in their historical perspective.

In the Orthodox Church the higher clergy are the Bishops, the Presbyters (priests) and the Deacons. To the lower clergy belong the Subdeacon and the Reader, who are laymen. The French Consul François Pouqueville writes that 100 Patriarchs and Bishops were killed during the Turkish Occupation and the Struggle [of 1821]. Before 1821 there were 80 movements made by Greeks, and most were led by Bishops. Remember that from 1680 to 1700 Eastern Central Greece was free after two Bishops revolted, Hierotheos of Thebes and Philotheos of Salona.

1821 is stained with the blood of Patriarch Gregory V and Patriarch Cyril VI, from Andrionople. Besides Bishop Germanos of Patras, who blessed the banner at Holy Lavra Monastery and in Patras, Isaiah of Salona declared Revolution in Fokida and was sacrificed in Alamana. The Patmian Patriarch of Alexandria, Theophilos Pagkostas, went to Patmos and raised the banner of revolution. From then he never returned to his throne.

Most Bishops of Peloponnesos were imprisoned by the Pasha of Tripoli from the beginning of March 1821, and only two were found alive when the Greeks entered after 6.5 months. Let us not forget this sacrifice of the shepherds.

In Cyprus, Archbishop Kyprianos had joined the Filiki Etairia (Society of Friends). The Turks were informed and on 9 July 1821 there was a great slaughter in Nicosia. Kyprianos together with all the Bishops and Archimandrites were killed together with the elders.

Many other Bishops played a significant role in the Struggle, such as Anthimos of Elos, Theodoritos of Vresthena, Joseph of Androusa, and Neophytos of Talantio (Livadeia). And in the Grand Exodus of Messolonghi, Bishop Joseph of Rogon, aid to Metropolitan Porphyrios of Arta, was sacrificed while blowing the windmill.

All who lived at that time were confessors: Bishops, priests, simple monastics, all proclaimed their “presence”. Our [Greek] Freedom is owed primarily to the Blood-stained Cassocks.

Eventually, the Serbs and Bulgarians threw off the Muslim yoke as well.[3] It was this series of humiliating defeats during the nineteenth century, and losses in the Balkan Wars of the early twentieth century, which enraged the Turkish Muslims, who turned on the weakest elements of their Christian population, precipitating their infamous genocide against the Christians of Armenia, Greece, Pontus, and Syria, massacring over 3.6 million men women and children (some dying from starvation, disease and the forced deportations) from 1894 to 1922. Sporadic persecutions against remaining Christians extended well into the 1950s, perhaps the worst example being the Istanbul Pogroms of 1955, which dealt a crushing blow to the Orthodox Christian community in Turkey. The Greek population of Turkey had already been reduced to about 120,000 in 1927 (following the main period of the Orthodox Christian Genocide); by 1978 it had collapsed to only 7,000. According to the Human Rights Watch, by 2006 there were only 2500 Greeks in Turkey.

Thus we see, from the very beginning of Muslim occupation of former Byzantine Christian lands, persecution of not merely lay Christians, but of all the clergy, including the Patriarchs, was standard practice for the Muslim Turks. Brutal and prolonged persecution, pressure and institutionalized discrimination has almost exterminated the Orthodox Christian population from what was once a flourishing Christian civilization. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the Muslim Turks mercilessly targeted the weakest of the weak, setting an example that Hitler extolled in his plans for his Third Reich.

When it comes to Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew, the Turks do not by any stretch of the imagination have a “rabble rouser” on their hands. Recently, yes, His All Holiness has taken a vocal stand against converting the great Hagia Sophia museum into a mosque.[4] He has also been persistent in asking for the Turkish government to return the Halki Seminary to the Patriarchate and allow it to reopen. The seminary, closed by the Turks in 1971, was the only indigenous Orthodox seminary in Turkey. Orthodox clergy since then must pursue theological studies overseas, yet bishops must meet ridiculously stringent requirements of Turkish citizenship in order to serve at the Phanar, the seat of the Patriarchate. +Bartholomew has also stood valiantly against suggestions by the Turks that the title “Ecumenical” be removed from his office.

And that’s not all. The ancient thread of crude and dangerous persecution from the Ottoman days is strong as ever in modern, moderate Turkey. As journalist Nicholas Gage pointedly observed back in 2008:

The Ecumenical Patriarchate, which was established in the fourth century and once possessed holdings as vast as those of the Vatican, has been reduced to a small, besieged enclave in a decaying corner of Istanbul called the Phanar, or Lighthouse. Almost all of its property has been seized by successive Turkish governments, its schools have been closed and its prelates are taunted by extremists who demonstrate almost daily outside the Patriarchate, calling for its ouster from Turkey.

The ecumenical patriarch, Bartholomew I, is often jeered and threatened when he ventures outside his walled enclave. He is periodically burned in effigy by Turkish chauvinists and Muslim fanatics. Government bureaucrats take pleasure in harassing him, summoning him to their offices to question and berate him about irrelevant issues, blocking his efforts to make repairs in the few buildings still under his control, and issuing veiled threats about what he says and does when he travels abroad.

In my book, Facing Islam, I express my concerns over some of His Holiness’ statements, notably in his book, Encountering the Mystery, where he writes of a “dialogue of loving truth” with Islam, and of Orthodoxy having for centuries “coexisted peacefully” with Islam, and where he also projects the chimera of an “interfaith commitment… still felt and lived by Greeks [and] Turks”[5] as an example for all to follow.

Elsewhere in his book, he goes even further, calling for the tearing down of “the wall of separation between East and West, between Muslims and Christians, between all religions of the world,” and writing warmly, “One who achieves the state of inner peace in relation to God is a true Muslim.”[6]

Such unfortunate effusions obscure the Truth of Christianity, giving the impression that +Bartholomew leans towards some sort of syncretic, relativistic creed, embracing the equal validity of all religions and especially of Islam and Christianity.

Yet we must understand such assurances in context, as being carefully crafted to pacify both the hostile government under whose thumb His All Holiness struggles to lead his flock, as well as the sea of easily agitated Muslims who surround the tiny island of Orthodoxy in Istanbul. No doubt +Bartholomew’s concern is to avert Muslim aggression not so much against himself, but against the dwindling Christian population of Turkey, which has endured nearly six centuries of relentless persecution and pressure from their Islamic masters. Sounding a falsely irenic tone is too often a sad necessity for those oppressed under Islamic rule.

While we may be heartened by the brave resolve and serene faith of Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew in the face of such overwhelming odds, if Muslim history is any indication, he may yet earn his heavenly crown in a far more abrupt fashion than his longsuffering, patient endurance of trials. May it not be so, and may God grant His All Holiness many years! And may we even see the conversion of Hagia Sophia back into a Christian church! [All emphases added]

Tuesday, 21 May 2013

The media blame Golden Dawn for being racist, but they don't say that the situation in Greece is beyond tolerability.

90% of illegal immigrants to Europe go through Greece, the gateway to our continent. One million immigrants are reported to be in Greece, half of whom illegal.

Ordinary, non-racist Greeks, whose lives have become unbearable due to the very high level of immigrants' crime which makes them scared of going out at night, vote for Golden Dawn because the party is the only one that tackles the problem and helps.

A Golden Dawn voter is the florist in the video, who says she ended up living in a ghetto.

Monday, 20 May 2013

It's working in Sri Lanka, a predominantly Buddhist country where people refuse to submit to Islamic law and eat ritually-slaughtered halal meat from animals killed while still conscious.

It will work in the UK and everywhere else.

It's sheer consumers' pressure.

Consumers in Sri Lanka refuse to buy halal food from school and other canteens, and the All Ceylon Canteen Owners Association, representing the canteen owners facing financial losses because they purchase halal products that they cannot sell, now boycott halal food products:

Canteen owners in Sri Lanka have decided to boycott halal products from April, the All Ceylon Canteen Owners Association told the ‘Colombo Gazette’newspaper.

President of the association, Asela Sampath, said that the decision was reached as most consumers refuse to purchase halal products.

Sampath said that repeated requests to the authorities to address the issue fell on deaf ears and the canteen owners were facing a loss by purchasing halal products and being unable to sell them.

As a result he said canteens operating on rent in schools and at other public places will stop purchasing and selling halal products from next month.

The move to boycott halal products comes days after the Bodu Bala Sena called for a complete ban on halal products instead of just removing the logo from products sold locally.

The Bodu Bala Sena had said that Sinhalese Buddhists must completely boycott halal products.

The All Ceylon Jamiyyathul Ulama (ACJU) had this week said it had decided to withdraw the halal logo from local food products as a result of the tensions which arose in the country recently.

Addressing a joint media briefing in Colombo between the ACJU, Ceylon Chamber of Commerce and a group of senior Buddhist monks, the ACJU said that the halal logo will not be issued in future for products sold locally.

However the logo will be made available as an option for products to be exported to some countries, the ACJU said.

ACJU President Rizvi Mufthi said that the halal certification was issued as a service to the Muslims and was not compulsory.

The Ceylon Chamber of Commerce said it did not expect the withdrawing of the logo for products sold locally to have an impact on businesses.

Susantha Ratnayake, chairman of the chamber, had said that the halal logo will be imprinted on products sent to some countries like in the Middle East and the Maldives where it is compulsory for the logo to be on food products.

The Bodu Bala Sena had meanwhile said that the sales of halal products at Muslim enterprises had dropped by 50 percent as a result of the debate on the issue created by the monks.

Saturday, 18 May 2013

A few days ago I got up determined to keep Islam and politics out of my mind - I tend to think about such subjects a lot these days - at least until I would turn my computer on and start working.

I went to the front door to check my mail and among the letters there was a leaflet with the menu of a local takeaway. I inspected it and found the dreaded word: "Halal".

There is no way you can keep Islam out of your life, even out of your thoughts for long, in today's Britain, even more so in today's London. The saying "If the mountain will not come to Mahomet, Mahomet must go to the mountain" seems particularly appropriate under the circumstances. I did not want to figuratively go to Islam, but Islam came to me.

I threw in the dustbin the takeaway leaflet, but not before having phoned the place to let the people running it know that I was about to keep their leaflet, since the takeaway is convenient and close to us, but that when I saw they were selling halal meat I got rid of it - which is exactly the truth. I added that there are many other people like me in our area who don't want to eat halal meat and that the takeaway is going to lose business because of this issue.

The only thing I did not mention is that I am a vegetarian, which is the best, surest way not to be affected by halal if you live in Londonistan, although I was vegetarian long before the birth of this problem in the West: I recommend it to everybody, regardless of the halal question. Let's not delude ourselves: even in the best conditions, slaughter is always atrocious for the animals, it is in fact murder. But although a vegetarian, I would not buy anything from a halal-meat-peddling outlet.

People who haven't seen the light sometimes say to me during a discussion that the Islamization of Britain is never going to happen, a view, alas, shared by many.

The fact is that we do not even need to talk about the future, because it is already happening.

A clear case of Islamization already present is that of halal meat.

This subject is one of those that most antagonizes British and other European natives against Islam for two reasons.

The first is that lots of people care about animals and they do not want to see them unnecessarily suffer to satisfy the ritual requirements of a doctrine, Islam, which is alien to us and seems to disprove its ethical and therefore religious status exactly with precepts like these that instruct its believers to increase, rather than diminish, the suffering in the world.

It looks paradoxical that the improvements that our civilized society has introduced to at least alleviate, if not eliminate, the terrible agony of slaughter should be reversed on the whim of a group of people with a way of thinking stuck in the 7th century AD and who came to our countries with their hands stretched out asking to be helped to get out of the poverty and backwardnedss that Islam forces on them, only to practically replicate those conditions here.

The second reason why halal meat is so unpopular is that here we can see in practice, perhaps for the first time on a large scale, what Islamization is.

What many people strongly object to is that they have been compelled to live according to Sharia law against their will, and that is the very essence of Islam and its supremacism.

Part of the reason for this is that not all meat produced from animals killed by halal methods of slaughter is suitable for Muslim consumption because it may still not meet other Islamic dietary requirements, and therefore may end up being sold to non-Muslims. Something similar happens with kosher meat for Jewish consumption, which may find its way to the wider community.

Even Easter eggs and cat food have been found to be halal in Australia, as denounced by the Aussie website Halal Choices, which is so popular that it has received more than 250,000 visits since the Christian activist Kirralie Smith created it two years ago.

And this is the good news. The movement against halal is global, developed in all Western countries with a Muslim population. Facebook alone pullulates with anti-halal pages, sometimes dedicated to the closure or the prevention of a local abattoir.

Only a couple of months ago a row erupted over a North-East London school's decision to start serving only halal meat to its pupils. Parents objected to these plans of the management at Larkswood Primary School in Chingford. These are people whom we should support. It was also discovered that halal is the only meat served in three-quarters of council-supported schools and academies (46 in total) in Waltham Forest Council.

The Daily Mail reporter who wrote the article about UK institutions and commercial outlets serving halal linked to above has managed to have access to a halal abattoir undercover. Here is what he witnessed:

They [Animals] are fully conscious as their throats are slit by a slaughterman as he utters prayers to Allah to ‘bless’ the animal. The ­creature then bleeds to death in a process that can take more than 30 seconds…

Though the deep incision to the neck cuts through the animal’s windpipe and main arteries, the creatures are still able to cry out.

During my two-hour visit, I watch as lamb after lamb has its throat sliced open while fully conscious. They make pitiful bleating and gurgling sounds as they choke on their own blood. It’s a chilling sound that, once heard, stays with you for days afterwards.

And then there’s the fact that the animals can witness each other being killed as they travel along the ­conveyor belt. Their hooves twitch wildly as they try to break fee.

One lamb cries out for more than 20 seconds before it flops off the end of the conveyor belt and on to a rotating table. From there, it is shackled by its hind legs and hauled up to the ceiling on a hook, where it is left with a dozen others to ‘bleed out’ — another ­important part of the halal process.

Of course, no slaughter of an animal is easy to watch. But it is hard to remain dispassionate as I watch ­dozens of still-conscious animals bleeding to death, the floor covered by an inch of warm, frothy blood.

The British law, which requires animals to be stunned and rendered unconscious before slaughter, should be changed so that it no longer makes exceptions for both halal and kosher, as the new counterjihad party (to which I belong) Liberty GB says in its manifesto. Sweden and Norway banned ritual slaughter in the 1930s. Switzerland, one of the most ancient countries to be based on popular consent and direct democracy, banned it as early as 1893.

It's worth explaining that, if we implement that, nobody will have to go against his or her religious beliefs or commandments.

Islam specifically exempts its faithful from the obligation to eat halal food if none is available:

He hath only forbidden you dead meat, and blood, and the flesh of swine, and that on which any other name hath been invoked besides that of Allah. But if one is forced by necessity, without wilful disobedience, nor transgressing due limits,- then is he guiltless. For Allah is Oft-forgiving Most Merciful. Quran (002:173)

Neither Islam nor Judaism prescribes meat consumption. If a follower of either faith does not want to eat non-permitted meat, he can be a vegetarian, thus also doing a favour to his heart and decreasing his risk of cancer.

Interestingly, it's a major secular Jewish philosopher, Peter Singer, who has this recommendation for Muslims and his fellow Jews in his book Animal Liberation (Amazon UK)(Amazon USA) (page 155, The New York Review of Books, second edition):

Meanwhile, those who do not wish to eat meat slaughtered contrary to the current teachings of their religion have a simple alternative: not to eat meat at all. In making this suggestion, I am not asking more of religious believers than I ask of myself; it is only that the reasons for them to do it are stronger because of the additional suffering involved in producing the meat they eat.

Jewish writer and Nobel Prize laureate Isaac Bashevis Singer, also a vegetarian, said: "I am not a vegetarian for my own health, but for the health of the chickens" and "every day is Treblinka for the animals". He wrote a very poignant short story, The Slaughterer, in which a compassionate man, Yoineh Meir, is appointed the town's ritual slaughterer in the old country, and obediently performs his duties but his life is turned into a living hell of nightmares and obsessions of blood and slaughter, until madness and drowning himself in the river become his final escape:

The killing of every beast, great or small, caused him as much pain as though he were cutting his own throat. Of all the punishments that could have been visited upon him, slaughtering was the worst.

While we are waiting for the law to be changed to prohibit ritual slaughter, at the very least halal meat should not reach the non-Muslim market (and kosher the non-Jewish), and all meat from animals who were slaughtered when conscious should be clearly labelled as such. There is certainly a vast number of people who want clear labelling, knowledge and choice.

Friday, 17 May 2013

Raymond Ibrahim, a scholar of Islam and Islamic history who has a particular focus on Muslim persecution of Christians, has on his website - for which I also write - a new article, Islamic Forced Conversions — Past and Present, highlighting the astonishing similarities of past atrocities, which many people in the West believe to have been consigned to distant history (belief largely due to the mainstream media's "carpet non-coverage" and total neglect of these everyday slaughters, massacres, beheadings, torture and discrimination), to current ones.

This canonization concerned the largest number of people to be elevated to sainthood at once in the history of the Catholic Church.

Muslims, and their tireless allies and apologists in the liberal media, cannot leave the Holy Father alone even when he is just doing his job, like canonizing new saints. And something as small as a symbolic hint and an indirect reference to current persecution of Christians, without any mention of specific countries or even Islam, can be enough for a Muslim website to say: "He did not mention any countries, but the Vatican has expressed deep concern recently about the fate of Christians in parts of the Middle East, including Coptic Christians in Egypt. The pope’s canonization is expected to raise anger among Muslims over linking Islam to violence."

And the NBCNews website faithfully echoed: "The choice of some of the new saints was also striking, touching on the already-fragile relationship between Christianity and Islam... So why risk creating yet another inter-faith row with a celebration which some in the Muslim world may be seen [sic] as a provocation?".

These comments are a reminder, if necessary, that things have not changed in Muslim intolerance towards Christianity, as Raymond Ibrahim explains in his new article:

The lost history of Christians forced to convert to Islam—or die—is reemerging, figuratively and literally. According to the BBC: “Pope Francis has proclaimed the first saints of his pontificate in a ceremony [last Sunday] at the Vatican—a list which includes 800 victims of an atrocity carried out by Ottoman soldiers in 1480.They were beheaded in the southern Italian town of Otranto after refusing to convert to Islam.”

The BBC adds in a sidebar: “The ‘Martyrs of Otranto’ were 813 Italians beheaded for defying demands by Turkish invaders to renounce Christianity. The Turks had been sent by Mohammed II, who had already captured the ‘second Rome’ of Constantinople.”

Historical texts throughout the centuries are filled with similar anecdotes, including the “60 Martyrs of Gaza,” Christian soldiers who were executed for refusing Islam during the 7th century Islamic invasion of Jerusalem. Seven centuries later, during the Islamic invasion of Georgia, Christians refusing to convert were forced into their church and set on fire. Witnesses for Christ [Amazon USA] , [Amazon UK] , lists 200 anecdotes of Christians killed—including some burned at the stake, thrown on iron spikes, dismembered, stoned, stabbed, shot at, drowned, pummeled to death, impaled and crucified—for refusing to embrace Islam.

If history is shocking, the fact is, today, Christians—men, women, and children—are still being forced to convert to Islam. Pope Francis alluded to their sufferings during the same ceremony: “As we venerate the martyrs of Otranto, let us ask God to sustain those many Christians who, in these times and in many parts of the world, right now, still suffer violence, and give them the courage and fidelity to respond to evil with good.”

Consider some recent anecdotes:

In Pakistan, a “devoted Christian” was butchered by Muslim men “with multiple axe blows [24 per autopsy] for refusing to convert to Islam.” Another two Christian men returning from church were accosted by six Muslims who tried to force them to convert to Islam, but “the two refused to renounce Christianity.” Accordingly, the Muslims severely beat them, yelling they must either convert “or be prepared to die. . . . the two Christians fell unconscious, and the young Muslim men left assuming they had killed them.”

In Bangladesh some 300 Christian children were abducted in 2012 and sold to Islamic schools, where “imams force them to abjure Christianity.” The children are then instructed in Islam and beaten. After full indoctrination they are asked if they are “ready to give their lives for Islam,” presumably by becoming jihadi suicide-bombers. (Even here the historic patterns are undeniable: for centuries, Christian children were forcibly taken, converted to and indoctrinated in Islam, trained to be jihadis extraordinaire, and then unleashed on their former Christian families. Such were the Janissaries and Mamelukes.)

In Palestine in 2012, Christians in Gaza protested over the “kidnappings and forced conversions of some former believers to Islam.” The ever-dwindling Christian community banged on a church bell while chanting, “With our spirit, with our blood we will sacrifice ourselves for you, Jesus.”

Just as happened throughout history, Muslims today regularly “invite” Christians to Islam, often presenting it as the only cure to their sufferings—sufferings caused by Muslims in the first place.

In Pakistan, a Christian couple was arrested on a false charge and severely beaten by police. The pregnant wife was “punched, kicked and beat” as her interrogators threatened to kill her unborn baby. A policeman offered to drop the theft charge if the husband would only “renounce Christianity and convert to Islam,” but the man refused.

In Uzbekistan, a 26-year-old Christian woman, partially paralyzed from youth, and her elderly mother were violently attacked by invaders who ransacked their home, confiscating “icons, Bibles, religious calendars, and prayer books.” At the police department, the paralyzed woman was “offered to convert to Islam.” She refused, and the judge “decided that the women had resisted police and had stored the banned religious literature at home and conducted missionary activities. He fined them 20 minimum monthly wages each.”

In Sudan, Muslims kidnapped a 15-year-old Christian girl; they raped, beat and ordered her to convert to Islam. When her mother went to police to open a case, the Muslim officer of the so-called “Family and Child Protection Unit,” told her: “You must convert to Islam if you want your daughter back.”

Indeed, because Christian females are the most vulnerable segments of Islamic societies, they are especially targeted for forced conversions. In 2012, U.S. Congress heard testimony about the “escalating abduction, coerced conversion and forced marriage of Coptic Christian women and girls [550 cases in the last five years alone].Those women are being terrorized and, consequently, marginalized, in the formation of the new Egypt.”

The researchers suspect that the glacial melting in the Everest region is due to global warming, but they have not yet established a firm connection between the mountains' changes and climate change, Thakuri said in the statement.

While Everest isn't the only Himalayan region seeing the effects of climate change, not all of the region's glaciers are melting. The Karakoram Mountains, on the China-India-Pakistan border, are holding steady and may even be growing. But shrinking glaciers in the rest of the Himalayas have drawn significant global attention, because the glaciers provide water and power for roughly 1.5 billion people.

Shrinking glaciers always draw more attention, because they fit in with the anthropogenic global warming theory, whereas new glaciers being formed or growing, which are just as numerous, contradict it.

Monday, 13 May 2013

The Coalition for Marriage in the UK has planned a very interesting free event (or rather two events with the same presentation, one in central London on 15 May and one in Chessington on 14 May - details below), with a very interesting guest, Ryan Anderson, whom they call "the man who gave Piers Morgan a run for his money" because of the way he outsmarted the British Leftist journalist on a USA TV debate on marriage.

Another speaker at the events will be Adrian Smith, the Manchester housing manager who was demoted and lost 40 per cent of his salary just for having said on his personal Facebook page that "gay" weddings in churches would be "an equality too far".

I'll be at the London event, so if you attend too we could meet:

We would like to remind you that Ryan Anderson, who brilliantly stood his ground defending marriage against a sneering Piers Morgan on American TV, will be visiting the UK next [now this] week.

Mr Anderson is a bright, young, articulate academic and author from Washington DC and he knows the arguments for marriage inside-out. We have organised two special events so that our supporters can hear what he has to say.

Also speaking at the events will be Adrian Smith, the housing manager from Manchester who was demoted and lost 40 per cent of his salary just for saying on his personal Facebook page that gay weddings in churches would be "an equality too far".

The problem of Christian discrimination and persecution by Muslims is in fact two problems. Like unpunished crimes’ victims who suffer twice, for the crime and for the injustice of the criminal’s going scot-free, while the atrocities committed against Christians are unbearable enough on their own, the total indifference of the rest of the world adds to the pain.

Floods, earthquakes, natural calamities and man-induced ones like the recent collapse of a factory in Bangladesh attract lots of media coverage and offers of foreign aid, but this does not happen with what Raymond Ibrahim has rightly called “arguably the world’s greatest humanitarian crisis” and Andrew McCarthy “the great unspoken civil rights issue.. [and] scandal of our day”.

How much Western governments care about the plight of the Christians living in Muslim-majority countries can be seen by how indifferent they were to the systematic discrimination of which Pakistani Christians, during that country’s 2010 devastating floods, were victims in the distribution of aid – essential to survival – ironically donated by those very same historically Christian Western countries.

In Islam “charity” has a different meaning from the Christian one, being a duty extended only to other Muslims. This semantic difference reflects that pseudo-religion’s division of humanity into the Muslim Ummah and the infidels, groups with very unequal status, whereas Christianity proclaims the equality of all human beings:

Allah has bestowed His gifts of sustenance more freely on some of you than on others: those more favoured are not going to throw back their gifts to those whom their right hands possess, so as to be equal in that respect. Will they then deny the favours of Allah? Quran (16:71)

There are theories that aspire to be scientific and are not – like many alternative medicine disciplines for example – and paintings or sculptures whose authors consider art but nobody else does. Similarly, Islam claims to be a religion but it fails the crucial tests for being one: making its faithful better persons and embracing reciprocity, one of the most fundamental, indeed basic, rules of ethics. Hence my choice of the appellative “pseudo-religion”, pretending to be a religion but not being one.

Foreign aid could in fact be used as a tool for Western governments and charities to demand equal treatment of Christians and other minorities in Muslim countries as a pre-condition for receiving that aid.

I have once provocatively advanced the proposal to give Pakistan, which is one of the world’s worst offenders in the persecution of Christians, “the South-African treatment”, isolating and repudiating it from the international community, which in the case of South Africa put pressure on Pretoria and played a big role in ending the apartheid. The British Commonwealth, of which that country was part, turned out to be particularly important in this process. Pakistan is also a member of the British Commonwealth, from which it should be banned until it abolishes its blasphemy laws.
South Africa’s bans from sporting events were also used as effective means of pressure, and so could be banning Pakistan from Commonwealth Games, Cricket World Cup, and similar.

We the undersigned petitioners believe that any aid given by Britain to Pakistan should have approriate [sic] accountability and traceability. We urge the Government of the UK to ensure that a significant proportion of the £225m given in aid last year for improvents [sic] to the educational provision in Pakistan, is used to level the diasparity [sic] of opportunity between minority faith groups and the Muslim majority. We call for this disproportionality to be set as a priority before and above overall holistic educational reform. Only 7% of minority people in Pakistan attain an adequate level of literacy and 86%of minority people work as janitors, sewarage [sic] workers or domestic servants.
We also call for the UK to use the commitment to provide aid to challenge the Government of Pakistan to take tangible steps towards a better human rights record (currently 125th out of 160 countries on UN Development index).

Another measure that the West could implement is that of giving preference to Christian asylum seekers and immigrants over others.

This was also the idea of Cardinal Giacomo Biffi, Archbishop of Bologna, one of the few Catholic high-ranking clergy members with a realistic, non-appeasing approach to Islam. He wrote in September 2000 that, not for religious reasons but purely to favour the peaceful integration of immigrant communities into Italy, we should favour Christian immigration.

To his motivation we can add the great Christian humanitarian crisis. For two reasons we should be particularly concerned about it: first, the numbers, one Christian estimated to be killed every 5 minutes just for his/her faith, give it priority; second, our particular relationship with the Christian world.

The West owes its existence to Christianity – along with Greco-Roman civilization – and in fact I consider the two terms synonymous. Christians the world over are culturally, if not geographically, part of the West: but then the West is a cultural, more than geographic, concept.

So, although we should be concerned about all, not just Christian, oppressed peoples of the world, I think that we Westerners owe a particular debt of gratitude to these brothers and sisters who are discriminated, persecuted and victims of violence just for being Christian, and despite that they keep their faith alive, the same faith that we take so much for granted that we have lost it.

They are martyrs in the true etymological sense of bearing witness to the value of the Christian faith.

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About Me

Philosophy graduate, journalist, website creator and
blogger born in Italy and living in London. I have been London correspondent for Italian media, including Panorama, L'Espresso, La
Repubblica. I translated Peter Singer's book Animal Liberation into Italian.